Reddit mentions of HighPoint Rocket 750 40-Channel SATA 6Gbps PCI-Express 2.0 x 8 HBA 750

Boom.

The answer to these is unfortunately hours of information... To sum up as best I can, you can run these or any server or home system setup in several ways... I go with JBOD and a backup, which is Just a Bunch Of Disks... It's like certain raid setups in that the drives all get added into a virtual mega drive... You can also have disk redundancy with a more traditional RAID setup, where the disks are cloned and checked to make sure no bits got corrupt... Both JBOD and RAID can be supported with these boxes, but, before you take this leap, I'd suggest building a test box first... Use either your current motherboard or a different computer, it doesn't matter... Most current boards support raid so you can play around with the board sata ports for testing different raid setups... Grab some (5 to test all raid modes) cheap 500gb drives and see how striping can speed up your file copy speeds dramatically, and how raid redundancy works... Both together would be a RAID 10 setup, but there are many...

WHILE you do that, what I'd truly suggest is to get a sas hba controller card... With this, you can also get expander cards to open up 4-40 new sata connections... Sata drives take little power, 1-5w idle and maybe 20-30w max when spinning, so your power supply doesn't need to be a huge wattage...

This way, you can truly learn all the things the storinators can do, and it's surprisingly easy... All for a combined 300-600 dollars worth of gear to start you off... These professional builds are for mega companies that just need the numbers, and have more money than sense, or for those who don't get computers but need the tech.. you can max out a system with 4 of these cards

https://www.amazon.ca/Highpoint-Rocket-750-40-Channel-PCI-Express/dp/B00C7JNPSQ

And that's 160 sata ports each card supports 40 sata drives... That and a 1500-2000w psu and you have a makeshift storinator.... As long as you're not accessing all drives at the same time, this will work... there is NO easy answer for what's the best way to store data... If you want the most overkill, get a bunch of those rocket 750 cards i posted, and setup a raid 10 or JBOD with parity check, then double that on a backup system... Then also invest in a google $10 a month cloud account and back it up online... It's part of the "3-2-1" backup solution...

At risk of making a word wall, to answer sas or sata, sas drives are faster enterprise drives... Not needed for our needs, but they are better built if you want more overkill... The BEST thing about sas is, it's compatible with sata drives... That's a one way thing; sata controllers can't read sas drives, but sas controllers can read sata... And each sas port can break out to 3-4 sata ports, hence why the rocket750 can do 40 sata drives... It's also safe to use sata power splitters if you need the extra connections, however stay away from molded connectors... You'll want the kind that look like they snapped together... Yeah, it's a lot to take in, but the amount of choices is silly...

I'd say get a big ass case, or even a 4U rack, no tower or cage needed as you can rest a 1-4U rack just like a computer case, and put in any motherboard and cpu, but focus on maxing out pcie lanes... Get as many sas hba and expander cards as you want and skip on a graphics or sound card... Run full onboard ... Stay away from thunderbolt connections as well as they use pcie lanes... Heck, run with no video at all and just admin it remotely... Max out your psu to a 1200-2000w monster as you'll need it once you get up there in drives... I find the power balancing is better on them... Get an LTO7 or LTO8 drive, any one, as they're all made by IBM, and backup your data to both a hard drive backup and a tape backup, and also backup to cloud ... From there, it's a horrible addiction of buying hard drives in some mad need to have enough space to download the internet...

Tldr; honestly, get a rocket750 and start from there, learn about RAID, JBOD, and the basics of redundancy, backups, and you're the only one who in time will know what you needed; speed, total space, access. Choice is the spice of life, and your meal is 1,000,000 scoville in this game

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage-pod-4/ lots of good hardware recommendations in there.

Edit: ok, maybe not lots, they just use the http://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-Rocket-750-40-Channel-PCI-Express/dp/B00C7JNPSQ card and it's definitely out of our league.

In the last version they were using CFI-B53PM port multipliers, those are cheap and very good apparently.

A single Rocket 750 supports 40 ports.